#211 Managing Long Sales Cycles and Maintaining Motivation

Notes:

There are always two sides to each story. In our case, it’s us, the providers, and the clients. What do our clients really want from us? Why are they acting this certain way? So on and so forth. Learn how you could get into your customers’ minds as Antoine Snow of AvePoint shares his experiences of having been on both the provider and client side!

Antoine Snow is the Manager of Solution Engineering at AvePoint Public Sector. In this episode, Antoine dissects the clients’ minds so service providers would know how to go about better with their moves at hand. He also dives deep into the differences between public sectoral projects and enterprises.

Key Topics:

How Antoine’s mindset changed as he experienced being in the shoes of both sales engineer and customer
What helped Antoine become a better SE from his experience as a customer
Why every business process should be curated on specific focal points
What differentiates projects in the public sectors and enterprises
Managing the different stakeholders on specific opportunities
How you can understand the customers more with Antoine’s testimonies when we were on the other side

Quotes:

“When you have different groups, it’s, it’s interesting because you can focus on the business problem, each group uniquely, where the problem comes in is where the different groups have different priorities that don’t align and they don’t realize it.” – Antoine Snow

“The sales team, not necessarily the sales engineer or the salesperson, but as a team, we tend to become marriage counselors.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“Business processes have a lot of similarities, but there are going to be differences or nuances depending on. So again, like I’m in public sector, my primary focal area, and the clients that I deal with on a day to day basis are all you know, government agencies of some sort, you know, but [when] you have Enterprise, things are different.” – Antoine Snow

“Stepping back and asking clarifying questions, in my opinion, isn’t a weakness.” – Antoine Snow